Lying

Missed a day yesterday! I still don't feel well, so instead of writing about my day, I'm gonna take the easy way out and write about an interesting (at least, in my opinion, as somebody with far too much time on my hands) difference between the book and play versions of this story; how they portray Christophers ability to lie.

The book presents this as fact; he does not understand the distinction between lying to mislead and saying something incorrect, so he avoids it completely. The version of Christopher in the play would also very much like you to believe he's incapable of lying, despite doing it frequently. He lies in the statement that he doesn't lie. Yes, he never outright tells someone something untrue because he finds it hard to understand why anyone would deliberately be wrong about something, but he does know how to mislead people and uses that to his full advantage. He lies to get out of conversations by claiming he doesn't chat to strangers, even though he initiated those interactions - and he gets away with it, because it 'doesn't count as chatting if it's for the investigation.' He lies to his father (and interestingly, his father leads off questioning by asking Christopher to 'tell him the truth,' which further cements him as the only person who actually takes Christopher seriously because he knows his son will absolutely lie to his face and has 100% done so before) by telling him about what he's done that day, truthfully, and conveniently leaves out that he was also snooping for information. He redirects conversations and throws out lies of omission constantly, and utilises the fact people think of him as incapable of manipulating them.

TLDR; I think it's a very fun take on this aspect of him! It helps remove some of the 'unassuming and helpless' aura of how there's just so much he can't do normally, and lets him sneak around like a typical teenager. It doesn't make him capable of doing things he wasn't able to do before, he's still perpetually confused by the thought of saying something that's just wrong, but now he can access the loopholes he should have been able to already when he's so keen on taking things literally. Biased as I might be, I think it's genuinely an improvement.